‘Minecraft’ PC 1.8 Bountiful Update Available As Pre-Release; Bunnies, Doors, And More

Mojang is ready to release another massive update to Minecraft on the PC. The 1.8 “Bountiful Update” is coming soon, but the pre-release version was made available Friday to those wishing to get a peek at all of the new creatures, blocks, and features in the open-world sandbox game.

Admitting that this is the longest developed update yet for Minecraft at 300 days, Mojang packed in items as simple as oddly adorable Rabbits and various new kinds of doors to new areas to explore underwater along with new mobs. Players will be able to craft their own banners now and character models with arms that are three pixels wide. An option to choose wider arms will come in a future update.

There are also significant structural changes behind the scenes that should hopefully improve the performance of Minecraft. The usual Herobrine joke fix is buried at the end of the patch notes as well.

Bunnies are now a thing for Minecraft.

The Minecraft 1.8 Bountiful Update is currently scheduled to be released on Tuesday, September 2. This pre-release version is meant to help the developers hunt down any game breaking or serious bugs at the last second. To get access to it, simply go into the Minecraft “Edit Profile” settings and select “enable experimental development versions.” You’ll see the ability to choose the version to use below it.

Player skins can now have double layers across the whole model, and left/right arms/legs can be edited independently

Added a new player model with smaller arms, and a new player skin called Alex?

Added options for configuring what pieces of the skin that are visible

Blocks can now have custom visual variations in the resource packs

Minecraft Realms now has an activity chart, so you can see who has been online

Minecraft Realms now lets you upload your maps

Difficulty setting is saved per world, and can be locked if wanted

Enchanting has been redone, now costs lapis lazuli in addition to enchantment levels

Villager trading has been rebalanced

Anvil repairing has been rebalanced

Considerable faster client-side performance

Max render distance has been increased to 32 chunks (512 blocks)

Adventure mode now prevents you from destroying blocks, unless your items have the CanDestroy data tag

Resource packs can now also define the shape of blocks and items, and not just their textures

Scoreboards have been given a lot of new features

Tweaked the F3 debug screen

Block ID numbers (such as 1 for stone), are being replaced by ID names (such as minecraft:stone)

Server list has been improved

A few minor changes to village and temple generation

Mob heads for players now show both skin layers

Buttons can now be placed on the ceiling

Lots and lots of other changes

LOTS AND LOTS of other changes

Removed Herobrine

According to the latest Minecraft stats, Mojang has sold almost 16.5 million copies of the PC game. Both the PS3 and Xbox 360 versions passed 15 million copies in June. The Playstation 4 Edition and Xbox One Edition are still in the works and will be released as soon as console developer 4J Studios gets all of the last bugs fixed.

Are you still playing Minecraft? What are you looking forward to with the 1.8 release? Let us know in the comments below.